


Quaint Honour

by anonymous_yet_again



Category: Benjamin January Mysteries - Barbara Hambly
Genre: Gen, Literal Sleeping Together, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-17
Updated: 2021-02-17
Packaged: 2021-03-16 01:14:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29445369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/anonymous_yet_again/pseuds/anonymous_yet_again
Summary: A plotless bit of self-indulgent stuff best summarized by a quote from the work:"January swung the shutters open quickly, and, despite recognizing the voice, had to look twice to understand what he was seeing.  Then he blinked, and the apparent bundle of muddy kindling resting against the railing opposite his room blinked back, and resolved itself into the half-collapsed form of Lieutenant Abishag Shaw."
Relationships: Benjamin January & Abishag Shaw
Comments: 2
Kudos: 7





	Quaint Honour

**Author's Note:**

> I am reading this series as fast as the ILL in my state will let me, so not incredibly quickly; I wrote this after reading book 2, and edited after reading book 3. It probably takes place sometime around those two books; Ben's shoulders aren't injured (yet? or recovered? you decide), his mother is in town, he still lives in her garçonnière. He has probably met Rose already, but she isn't in this (though I think she's neat) because it is almost totally just Shaw and Ben.

The knock on his shutters came in the small hours of the morning, shortly after Benjamin January had succeeded in achieving a light doze. He’d been out playing at a ball until shortly after midnight--an American one, hence the fact that he was back in his garçonnière at all at this hour. If it had been a French ball, he would doubtless have still been gone.

January came awake quickly at the sound, which was faint, though whether the person outside was trying not to wake him, or not to wake those sleeping elsewhere in the house, wasn’t clear. He got out of bed carefully and reached for his pants, trying not to make much noise; either he failed at this, or the person outside his room understood the hesitation to open to an unidentified nighttime visitor, because the knock came again, still quiet, and a hoarse tenor voice said softly, “Maestro, it’s me.”

January swung the shutters open quickly, and, despite recognizing the voice, had to look twice to understand what he was seeing. Then he blinked, and the apparent bundle of muddy kindling resting against the railing opposite his room blinked back, and resolved itself into the half-collapsed form of Lieutenant Abishag Shaw.

Shaw looked exhausted, as much as any emotion showed on that narrow, ugly face, but he didn’t have any obvious injuries at first glance. This wasn’t saying much, since his body was coated in dark slimy mud. “Did you crawl through the bayou to get here?” muttered January, deciding quickly that what he needed was to get Shaw down to the yard and the kitchen, rather than pull him into the garçonnière, which had January’s medical bag but no water source.

“Somethin’ like that,” said Shaw. January hadn’t seen him for a few days; last he heard, Shaw had been chasing down a small group of smugglers who operated out in the ciprière. This looked like they might have turned around and chased him right back. “Lost ‘em,” Shaw added, accepting the hand January extended and rising from where he was sitting. It took him two tries. “Wouldn’t have come here, else. Wouldn’t have brought them on you.” He seemed almost anxious for January to understand.

In the end, January stood Shaw in the yard--he swayed in place--and swilled him down with buckets of water, clothes and all, before finally deeming him clean enough to come into the kitchen. There he heated water and went back upstairs for supplies, moving carefully and aware, all the time, of Bella asleep in her room above the kitchen. Shaw sat down on a piece of the kitchen floor where he could lean on the wall, and looked like he would fall asleep there.

Once the water was warm, January fetched a washrag and started cleaning Shaw in earnest, starting at the crown of his head, and looking for injuries as he did. Shaw had been hit on the head at some point, which became clear when he sucked in a breath through his teeth--and made no other reaction--when January ran the cloth over the lump behind one ear. “Few days old,” Shaw said, when January looked him a question, which wasn’t exactly the answer he was looking for, but he accepted that it was healing. He made a bundle of Shaw’s wet coat and shirt--he wanted to throw them out, but was aware the man would probably protest they were close enough to clean--and turned to cleaning his scarred torso. The only new injuries there were small cuts and slightly larger bruises; Shaw didn’t react at all as he cleaned them. January glanced at the Lieutenant’s face, wondering if he’d fallen asleep for real, but his gray eyes were still open in slits, watching January’s dark hands move gently over his pale ribcage.

That ribcage made January frown a little. At his healthiest, January knew, Shaw looked like a bag of bones; but he looked even bonier now than sometimes in the past. January pulled him to stand up, propped him on the wall like a scarecrow that had been taken out of the field for the season, and unfastened his pants. Shaw’s hipbones were like knives.

“Sir,” said January, turning away to re-wet the cloth, and aware that it was an odd way to address the naked man he was washing in his kitchen in the dark of the morning, “when’s the last time you ate anything?” Shaw didn’t respond, because, it turned out, he’d fallen asleep after all, despite the fact that he was standing up.

January woke him up and repeated the question. Shaw’s eyes glinted in the glow of the stoked stove. “Yesterday,” he said.

It was, technically, very early on Saturday morning. January didn’t know for sure whether Shaw meant he’d had a meal on Friday, or on Thursday before that, but he was afraid he could guess. “When did you eat before that?” he said.

Shaw had to think about this one, and almost fell asleep again while he did. “Tuesday?” he offered eventually. January sighed.

January’s first assessment had been fundamentally correct; Shaw didn’t have any life-threatening injuries. He also hadn’t slept for longer than he hadn’t eaten, and had spent an unspecified period of time--he seemed to have lost track, but January suspected at least twelve hours--trying to escape pursuers out in the ciprière. Since Shaw kept falling asleep instead of answering whispered questions, January couldn’t be sure of his reasoning in showing up at Livia Levesque’s house, but it seemed that he’d made it back to the city, genuinely unsure if he was seriously injured or not, and hadn’t been able to face up to the prospect of going all the way back to his boardinghouse, so he’d come to January’s room instead. In many ways, this was uncharacteristically trusting of him, and January was touched.

For reasons of propriety more than temperature, January slid his own nightshirt onto Shaw before sneaking him, half-asleep on his feet, back up to the garçonnière. He gave Shaw the bed. Sleep transformed Shaw’s face just as much as a smile did, though in a different way; he looked younger and almost vulnerable, without his keen eyes taking in everything around him. “I think this is the cleanest I’ve ever seen you,” January muttered to Shaw’s still form, and went to clean the mud off the gallery railing.

It was when he’d cleaned up and closed up the kitchen and was mounting the stairs back up to the gallery that January heard the thud. If he had heard it, he was sure Bella had, too, so he took the last several stairs two at a time--trying to stay light on his feet--and put his medical bag down in a shadow. Sure enough, there was motion at the shutters to Bella’s room. “Michie Ben?” came her quiet voice, questioning.

“Tripped and stumbled,” January shot back quickly, hoping she’d accept the explanation and assume he’d come outside to answer nature’s call--and that she _wouldn’t_ open her shutters or think to question that he was wearing pants, and only his pants, having given his nightshirt away. “Sorry to wake you.”

Bella accepted the explanation easily, and subsided; January went into his room and found Shaw pushing himself up off the floor. “Where are you _going_?” he said, as forcefully as he could while whispering. “Sir.”

Shaw muttered something that sounded like “Lyin’ down on the job,” and swayed on his knees. He didn’t seem to be actually talking to January.

January took the step he needed to be close enough to take Shaw’s arm--the room wasn’t large--and hauled him back to his feet, gently. “You’re not on the job, you’re resting,” he said.

Shaw’s eyes focused on him, and then moved around to take in the room. “My ‘pologies, Maestro,” he said, “I was dreamin’.”

“I can imagine,” said January, and put him in the bed again. The wet bundle of Shaw’s ruined clothes sat in the corner of the room; January made a bundle with a couple of his own extra shirts to serve as a pillow, took one of his blankets, and settled down to sleep on the floor.

The second time Shaw tried to get up, he rolled off the bed directly onto January. Almost directly--he landed on his hands and knees, half on January and half on the floor, which at least muffled the thud enough that no one else responded. January gasped wordlessly for a minute, since he’d been asleep right up until Shaw’s elbow had landed on his chest, and his bony knee in the meat of January’s thigh. The man had no flesh to pad his joints.

“Ben,” said Shaw distinctly.

“I’m right here, yes,” said January, turning his head and trying to catch Shaw’s eye. This was harder than it should have been with their faces adjacent; Shaw wasn’t actually looking at him, and his light hair hung down around his head like a curtain.

“Get to Ben,” said Shaw.

“Oh,” said January, and moved enough that Shaw realized he was crouched on a person, and moved off of him. “You did that already. You’re here.”

Shaw looked at him and said, “Oh,” and then passed out. January had to lift him to get him back onto the bed.

The third time--it was starting to get light outside--Shaw didn’t come back to reality. “You’re not in the ciprière, you made it back,” January said directly into his ear; they were standing in the middle of the room, Shaw making weak efforts to go--somewhere. January was behind him, arms around his torso. He wasn’t sure where Shaw would go if he let go, but he didn’t want to find out. Shaw didn’t respond. January felt his head and neck to check for fever, looked to see if any of his cuts showed infection, and didn’t find anything to worry about. Well, anything else. It seemed that Shaw had just spent enough time in the last couple days pushing himself to wake up and keep moving that he was trying to keep doing it even now that it was safe to go to sleep.

Normally, January knew, Shaw would have disengaged himself from January’s hold some time ago, but currently he was exhausted and possibly not even aware that there was a person holding onto him. January took a tentative step back towards the bed, and drew Shaw with him easily. He looked at the bed, and the light coming in under the shutters, and sighed. He wouldn’t be expected out of his room for another couple hours, after the hour he’d arrived back; maybe he would even manage to sleep for some of them.

It was clear daylight; someone knocking at the shutters to January’s room woke him. For a minute he thought he’d dreamed the night before; then he became aware of his position. “I’ll be with you soon,” he called, trying to pitch his voice to carry and to stay quiet at the same time.

January’s shoulders were wedged into the corner where his bed sat; he was propped against two walls, half-sitting. Lieutenant Shaw was asleep on his chest. January’s arms were still wrapped around Shaw’s waist; Shaw had tried to get up a few more times during the night, but subsided more quickly each time when January just wrapped his arms tighter and anchored him to the bed. Now--well, to be honest, the easiest way to describe it was that he was in January’s lap, bare legs stretching down the bed, head sideways against January’s sternum. His perpetually unshaven chin scratched the skin on January’s bare chest any time either of them moved.

At least, January reflected ruefully, between the two of them, they were wearing enough clothing for one person to be decently clothed.

“Ben, it’s me,” said Hannibal Sefton’s voice outside the shutters, sounding surprisingly sober for that hour of the morning. “I can come back; I wanted to see if you wanted to play together at all before the quadroon ball tonight.”

Part of January wanted to tell Hannibal to come back later. On the other hand, to sneak Shaw out of his mother’s house now it was full daylight, he suspected he’d need an accomplice. Or maybe he could leave Shaw there for the time being, let him catch up on his much-needed sleep. He would ask Hannibal’s advice. “...you can come in,” he said. “Don’t be loud.”

“Why--” started Hannibal, flipping up the latch on the shutters, and then he quieted. “Oh, I see. ‘ _The grave’s a fine and private place, but_ \--’”

“Quiet,” said January. “It wasn’t like that; I’ll explain. And then we can play together. In between, it’s possible I’ll need you to distract my mother.”

Shaw shifted once but, astonishingly for such a normally alert man, didn’t wake. January tightened his hold automatically.

“‘ _Yet we will make him run_ ,’” said Hannibal. “How can I help?”

**Author's Note:**

> The title and Hannibal's quotations come from Andrew Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," implying something about Ben and Shaw's position that Ben, at least, hadn't been considering seriously (until now?? maybe.). The full couplets Hannibal pulls from are:
> 
> "The grave's a fine and private place,  
> But none I think do there embrace."
> 
> and
> 
> "Thus, though we cannot make our sun  
> Stand still, yet we will make him run."


End file.
